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A New Method for Enumerating Independent Sets of a Fixed Size in General Graphs
Author(s) -
Alexander James,
Mink Tim
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of graph theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.164
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1097-0118
pISSN - 0364-9024
DOI - 10.1002/jgt.21861
Subject(s) - mathematics , conjecture , combinatorics , maximal independent set , indifference graph , chordal graph , discrete mathematics , pathwidth , 1 planar graph , graph , line graph
We develop a new method for enumerating independent sets of a fixed size in general graphs, and we use this method to show that a conjecture of Engbers and Galvin [7] holds for all but finitely many graphs. We also use our method to prove special cases of a conjecture of Kahn [13]. In addition, we show that our method is particularly useful for computing the number of independent sets of small sizes in general regular graphs and Moore graphs, and we argue that it can be used in many other cases when dealing with graphs that have numerous structural restrictions.